In view of the general topic of the 2014 DGfS meeting ‘A God Particle of Language? Theory, Empirical Evidence and the Future of Linguistic Categories’ that aims at the very foundations of human language (its ‘particle zoo’ with its keeper), this workshop looks for converging evidence from different disciplines and methods for hypotheses about those foundations in two domains:

(a) basic conceptual categories in and outside of language, their mental and neural representations and their cross-personal coordination (mind sharing);(b) embodied and other approaches to understanding those basic conceptual categories in special and conceptual content in general inside and across individual minds and brains.

Assuming that language evolved out of other capacities, the search for basic building blocks will arguably profit from the study of counterparts and possible ancestors in non-linguistic cognition. Given the universality of linguistic categories such as the following, this entails that their non-linguistic counterparts, the relations between them and the corresponding mental and neural representations are worthy objects of investigation:

In view of the notorious problems of pinning down conceptual content, the claim that concepts are ‘represented in human memory by the sensorimotor systems that underlie interaction with the outside world’ (Embodied Cognition; Pecher & Zwaan 2005) is definitely good news: It opens up a new way of empirically investigating concepts and their linguistic activation patterns.

Whereas the debate between fierce proponents and opponents of embodiment is far from being settled (Willems & Francken 2012) the existence of reliably replicable embodiment effects is now safely enough established (at least for object and motion concepts) to move on and to ask questions like the ones this workshop is meant to address:

- Which basic categories of language in special and of cognition in general are embodied to what extent and in what way?- To what extent and how does a double embodiment of language (perceptible form and conceptual content) constrain the space for (basic) categories of possible languages?

Data from research on gesture and sign as well as spoken language (Zaefferer & Bach 2011) suggest that understanding the precise nature of the mental representations of basic categories can be informed by embodiment. The primary goal of the workshop is to dig up converging evidence on the nature of the above categories by drawing on the different relevant disciplines.